A robot may be described as humanoid as long as it possesses certain attributes of the appearance and functionalities of man: a head, a trunk, two arms, optionally two hands, two legs, two feet etc. Beyond appearance, the functions that a humanoid robot is capable of fulfilling will depend on its capacity to perform movements, to speak and to “reason”. Humanoid robots are capable of walking, of making gestures, with the limbs or with the head. The complexity of the gestures that they are capable of performing is continually increasing.
Certain robots can speak, in response to stimuli from the environment. The development of speech recognition and synthesis tools has also made it possible to develop functions for dialog between certain robots and humans that significantly enrich the possibilities for interactions. Such man-robot interfaces using speech are disclosed notably by U.S. Pat. No. 7,711,569 as well as by the application published under the number US2009/287678.
In these prior art documents, the imperfections inherent in voice recognition are alleviated by recourse to semantic and/or contextual aids which require access to a database, learning and the use of significant calculation resources to be able to resolve doubts of recognition—low recognition confidence interval, false positives, false negatives etc. The use of these means is not appropriate in the case of a multifunction humanoid robot which must be economical in its calculation resources so as to manage its critical processes such as locomotion.